Karen Armstrong explores the purpose of sacred texts in The Lost Art of Scripture

British researcher Karen Armstrong speaks at a press conference in Oviedo, Spain, on Oct. 17, 2017.My chat with Karen Armstrong about the sacred texts of scripture begins with Lion Man –, in German – on display in the Ulm Museum on the River Danube: 31.1 centimetres high, 5.6 centimetres wide, and somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 years old. Her new book begins, stealthily on little cat feet, but abruptly, with a description of the lion-headed figure.

talks in breathtaking depth about the origins of the divine accounts from the monotheistic, Greek, Indian and Chinese religions. They were presented as performances, she says. They were sung, recited, acted out. They were intended to transport audiences into a transcendent spiritual dimension. They were not meant to be history. They were intended to exemplify a way of life, and what they all hit on, she says, is compassion, the Golden Rule, replacing “self” with the “other.

Basically that we can transform ourselves, that we are not stuck in a sort of temporal mode, that there is a dimension of ourselves that we can cultivate. But it requires a discipline. It requires that we abandon an egotism that holds us back from our best selves and especially in the exercise of compassion for others. The scriptures are not telling us what God is because God cannot be defined.

By the end of Chapter 3, God has lost control of his creation. He can’t control what human beings are doing. The benign God becomes a cruel destroyer at the time of the flood. The impartial God shows monstrous favouritism and we are made to feel the pain of the rejected ones, Cain and Esau, and Hagar, who is left in the wilderness by Abraham, left to die with her son, Ishmael.

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

GlobeArts Excellent thoughts on the unknowable God since all these texts say basically the same in that it is up to each one of us to do the best we can in a difficult world of humans and these texts are just an excellent guide but we have to learn and live being what life is all about. ..

GlobeArts Read some of her books on various religions, tacky and amateurish on historical references.

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